The Baron of Bunker Hill

Many consider the Baron the best high school basketball player in LA history. But a devastating knee injury derailed any hope for a pro career. Three operations and five years later, he can't accept his wife Anita's view that it's time to move on.

Easy for her to say. She has a career, spending her days deciding how to rehabilitate and redevelop neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Ray, the Baron, is just another project that needs repurposing. But tear downs and tenements don't resist like her husband. What is it about basketball that he can't give up?

She sees hints of the attraction and flashes of the old Baron when he joins in a free flowing game of stuff ball on 8 foot baskets with her work colleagues and, even more, when he joins an adult league team sponsored by his new employer, New Century LA. But why would this company pay Ray a hundred grand a year to do PR and to play for them? Ray doesn't care. It's great money. He can try to get pro scouts to see him back in action. And they offer full medical, which would include knee replacement surgery, that they can't otherwise afford.

But Anita worries, both about the danger to Ray's knee and her inability to find out anything about New Century. Is it involved in real estate projects that create conflicts with her work? Could it be connected to a secret downtown project that the mayor won't talk about?

The answers are yes and yes, but Ray doesn't care. They've offered him a share of the profits on the skid row redevelopment venture. Just in time, as he's decided that he no longer has what it takes to play basketball at the highest level. Anita should be happy, right? But she's not. What about the people whom this project will displace? Will they be cast aside like the poor and elderly were during the scandalous Los Angeles Bunker Hill redevelopment project decades ago? And what about her job?

But Ray refuses to discuss it, storming off, only to return just in time to hear the FBI knocking on their door. New Century's unknown owners turned the skid row project into a Ponzi scheme, siphoning off millions, and setting Ray up as the fall guy. He's arrested and the mayor, hiding his own complicity, suggests Anita should be, too.

A new lawyer volunteers to represent the Baron. He gets him out of jail, investigates Ray's actual involvement, and is convinced he's innocent. If only they could trace the money. Anita, with the help of a perky, never-say-die intern, does just that. So when the mayor publicly disses Ray, Anita storms on foot through the streets of LA to City Hall, followed by a crowd of supportive homeless, barflies, and Ray's fans. Hell hath no fury like a woman who's man has been scorned.

In the end, Ray is exonerated, the two are together again, and Ray is back in the game. But what game?